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Barras Further Mar Game Beset by Violence

By Daniel Altman March 17, 2008 11:07 amMarch 17, 2008 11:07 am

Daniel Altman is the global economics columnist of the International Herald Tribune and is author of its Managing Globalization blog. The former right wing has lost enough pace over the years to slip back into a defending role. Before landing at the IHT, he supplied crunching tackles for the Home Office of the British Government, a World Cup pool for The Times business section and roughly half the scoring of the 2000-2001 season for The Economist.

BUENOS AIRES — The alarm bells should be ringing in Argentina. Soccer-related violence, a problem so institutionalized here that gangs of hardcore fighters (and so-called fans) are on the payrolls of the major clubs, peaked this week in a series of tragic incidents.

The trouble began on Thursday, when the Gimnasia de Jujuy team bus pulled into the parking lot of the Altos Hornos Zapla stadium for practice before an away fixture. According to local news reports, a group of eight to 10 fans, some with guns, boarded the bus and accosted the players. At first, they demanded better results. Then, before leaving, they demanded and received some of the players’ jackets and uniforms.

Fans of the soccer club Velez Sarsfield supporters climbed a barbed-wire topped fence at the San Lorenzo stadium in Buenos Aires after the match was suspended Saturday. (Victor Grubicy/Reuters)

On Friday night, the violence worsened – albeit this time unintentionally – as a 17-year-old girl was killed when a gun belonging to one of her friends went off on the way to the stadium for another lower division match at the stadium of Gimnasia y Tiro.

Why was the young man carrying a gun to a match? Perhaps you should ask the so-called fans in the capital. On Saturday in Buenos Aires, a 21-year-old fan of Velez Sarsfield was shot on his way to San Lorenzo’s stadium for a game in Argentina’s top league. He later died in the hospital, while the police speculated that the “barras” (Argentina’s version of the violent “ultras” familiar to Spanish and Italian fans) of either San Lorenzo or Huracán – a team that wasn’t even playing on Saturday – could be to blame.

The game was abandoned, and the police clashed with fans as they left the stadium in chaos. That night, at another match just outside the capital, fans of Independiente and Gimnasia y Esgrima de La Plata waved anti-violence flags. At the stadium, your correspondent saw Independiente’s unofficial mascot, a man in a hokey devil costume, wearing a t-shirt that read “Enough of the Violence.”

But then on Sunday, a Boca Juniors fan was stabbed before he and his fellow supporters made their way to the match against Huracán. Other Boca fans, it is rumored, were the culprits.

Other Boca fans? Yes, indeed. There are warring factions within the barras, whose level of organization is similar to that of an advanced criminal enterprise.

The leaders of the groups are well known to the press, police and public. They negotiate with the clubs, which often pay them off in exchange for promises – not always kept – to keep violence to a minimum. There are even alliances between the barras of different teams, perhaps a reason why the barras of Huracán, a great rival of San Lorenzo, might have been lurking near their pitch for the Velez match.

All of this sounds familiar. England had the same problem as recently as the early 1990s, and it took a comprehensive security crackdown to break the hooligans’ hold on the game. The English may not have addressed the root causes why groups of young and middle-aged men decided to meld violence with soccer, but they did enough to stop the consequences.

In Argentina, however, the main responses have been to keep visiting fans in separate sectors during matches and to allow them to board their buses before the locals can leave the stadium. In general, only the most high-profile cases of violence – murders, for example – are actively pursued and prosecuted.

Comparing these events to what took place in England 30 years ago shows a lack of research on your part. While neither situation is right. In England it was more about a show of force and intimidation rather than the desire to actually kill. Deaths in England back then were more a result of poor stadiums and crowd control (Hillsboro) than intent on murder.

Actually, PZ, I think the two cases do have a lot in common. Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs, for example, suggests that many English hooligans fought for the sheer thrill of violence and letting the psychology of the mob take over.

If all the Argentine barras wanted to do was kill people, then there would be a heck of a lot more deaths. One of the main differences may be that the barras have better access to firearms than the hooligans did. But plenty of hooligans were beat up and stabbed – even if they didn’t die – at the height of violence in England.

I’ll buy the socioeconomic similarities. However, as you pointed out, they didn’t have guns in England. Those who were hurt were looking for trouble. I haven’t read Buford’s book. However, I was there at that time as well. I watched the rituals–from the safety of the other end of the ground. From the Wikipedia entry you linked to, it said joined those looking for trouble. The Barras are much more organized than any English firm…the extort money/tickets from the club and kill innocent people.

Then again, maybe it’s because the club I followed was so isolated from the rest of the country but even though I could see and hear all the tribal rituals, I still felt save before, during and after matches. I can’t say I’d feel the same in Argentina.

One thing though, what’s it going to take for Argentina (the Dutch, German’s or Italians) to get a ban like the one England suffered?

Here in Brazil it is mostly a problem with the “Torcidas Organizadas” – Organized groups of fans, fighting with other club’s groups and sometimes with groups of the same club.

In São Paulo they have been outlawed, but not in Rio de Janeiro state. In most games, especially between Rio’s “big four” clubs, there is always a lot of confusion before and after games with the different groups clashing, fighting sometimes in the subways’s cars, for instance. Police cannot be everywhere.

If one is a neutral or not involved with these groups, the wise thing to do is to use another
t-shirt to arrive at or leave a stadium, and especially take care to keep distance from the groups, which want actually to fight one another, not go “wilding” everywhere. Deaths are rare, though.

In one incident 2 years ago, fans from 2 clubs (one from Rio, another from the northeast) exchanged insults through ORKUT the week before a match (most form communities in ORKUT); after the game, groups in automobiles from the Rio club chased the bus on the highway taking fans all the way back to the northeast; when the police scort left, a shooting fight started, resulting in 2 dead fans.

Rich or poor, Human nature will never change, and in matters concerning soccer, in most countries fans’ groups should be outlawed and not supported by clubs.

Bill Buford’s “Among the Thugs” is yellow journalism at best. He may have been _among_ the thugs, but he didn’t really know them. For a much more detailed and nuanced picture of hooliganism in the 80s, particularly, read Gary Armstrong’s “Football Hooligans: Knowing the Score.” Armstrong ran with the Sheffield Weds firm for years before he even thought about writing about hooliganism, and shows an understanding of how real social groups work, not the sensationalistic fantasy organization that Buford portrays.

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